A L KENNEDY: THE BLUE BOOK

The Associate Professor of Creative Writing reads from her new novel

A L Kennedy’s latest novel The Blue Book explores the world of the professional medium as well as telling a tumultuous love story. At a recent event at Warwick Arts Centre, the award-winning novelist and Professor on the Warwick Writing Programme read an extract from the book and discussed its background.

Listen to A L Kennedy read an extract from The Blue Book (warning: this podcast includes explicit language that some may find offensive):

With five published novels and five collections of short stories, numerous radio dramas and a stand-up comedy career behind her, A L Kennedy is a busy woman. Her latest novel, The Blue Book, set on an ocean cruise liner, took three years of preparation and a year to write, in between her teaching commitments at the University of Warwick’s Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. In this discussion with Honarary Teaching Fellow, Anna Lea (which you can listen to in full at the bottom of the page), she answered questions about The Blue Book and the nature of her craft.

How did you start your latest novel?

Any word can work a spell... it’s a combination of having some ideas of character identities, things that concern Alison, things that concern them, correlation, locations I’m interested in. It was mainly two people in the book who were running it from the outset. I did research into hypnotive writing, mentalism, mediums and psychics. If you cultivate open-mindedness then ideas will arrive.

The structure of the book and language are shaped to conceal and reveal in equal measure. There’s a layer of language to distract the reader. The language is characteristic of a lot of your work, changing all the time…

Language is a dynamic, enormous, powerful, slightly chaotic oceanic thing, and sometimes very beautiful. It can kill you if it redefines you in a negative manner, it can diminish your life, it can free you. I did the first rewrite of the novel on an ocean liner. I wasn’t allowed to throw 360 pieces of paper into the sea… I was trying to make something that would be understandable to somebody other than myself. Writing the two love scenes took ages.

What’s the importance of emotion in your work?

Why would you pay attention to someone? You have to think about that when writing because you want someone to pay attention. How do you make somebody interested? What would make you think that someone who isn’t alive, and who has never been alive, is more interesting than all the other things you can think about? Part of that is you can suspend your disbelief and believe [the characters] are human. Emotion is one of the characteristics we identify as being human. I think if you can conjure up psychology and emotion, it’s useful.

Does experience in performance and writing for actors transfer into fiction?

Hopefully the music of the dialogue makes sense. It’s the voice of the book and your voice blending together to make it happen.

In The Blue Book, one of the protagonists, Arthur Lockwood, is intent on the right way of doing wrong, and wants his audience to feel loved despite the fact that he’s actually conning them. Do you admire Arthur?

I love all my people even when they’re horrible, it’s the only way to write anything of any length. I think about the characters for about three years and I have to write the book over about a year, so that’s being with somebody about four years. You’ve got to love them! You have to find something that’s interesting and tolerable about them and hopefully you can convey that to the reader. I don’t approve of what [Arthur] does. He thinks he’s doing the right thing. He’s being a psychic in an entirely fake but very effective way.

Listen to the full Q&A below:

A L Kennedy is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. She has published numerous novels, collections of short stories and non-fiction books. She contributes columns and reviews to UK and European newspapers and writes for radio, television and stage. She is also known for her stand-up comedy shows, which have toured internationally.

In 2007 she won the Costa Book of the Year award for her fifth novel, Day. Her most recent novel, The Blue Book, is published by Jonathan Cape.

By Penelope Jenkins